Advertising Your Blog
Posted on November 6, 2007
Filed Under Advertising | 3 Comments
Advertising your blog can be hard work if you’re not sure what you’re doing. There is a right way and a wrong way and plenty of variations in between!
Of course, the obvious way of advertising your blog is going through the adsense route and paying for ads. This method does work extremely well as long as you get your ad copy right for the few words that you are allowed in the tiny text ad and of course your keywords match exactly to you blog. It can also cost quite a lot which might be off-putting to newer bloggers, who ironically are the ones who need to advertise the most in order to attract readers to their blog.
A more wallet-friendly way of advertising is then needed.
Of course the most satisfying advertising methods are the free ones, especially when they do bring traffic to your blog. And there are plenty of them to choose from, but I’ll only cover the most effect ones here.
These are free methods of advertising that I’ve personally found work very well in bring lots of visitors to my blogs.
The top method is making full use of social networking sites, like MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, Bumpzee and many others. They are all free to sign-up with and allow you to create your own profile and submit your blog(s) so that other members can see you and your blog(s). They will get around to contacting eventually you but it’s better if you get busy and start making contact with other members who have blogs or interests in the same niche as yours. That way they get to know about you straight away and will most often visit your page to see who you are and then click on the link to your blog to have a look for themselves.
Trust me, after only a few days of busily making new friends in these sites, you’ll see a huge increase in traffic to your blog. Assuming your blog is well written, interesting and updated regularly, these people will keep coming back to it to see what else you’ve written.
Another good way of advertising your blog is to visit other blogs in your niche and make comments on the newest posts. We’ve covered commenting in here already, but suffice it to say you should make your comments relevant to the post and something that if you were to sit back and read it as if you were someone else, you could honestly say that it was an interesting comment!
Using forums to advertise your blog also works well, but take a bit of time to build up your credibility and get your self known, but once you have done that you will see traffic coming from these sources as the members start clicking the links to your blog that you will place in your signature.
Writing original articles and submitting them to article databases and ezines with a link back to your blog is another effective free method of advertising the presence of your blog. Make sure your article is unique and interesting an on-topic and the readers will be sufficiently curious to click your link and visit your blog.
Lastly, submitting on-topic posts to this site will get you a lot of free traffic and a valuable one-way link back to your blog! Simply register for free and submit your original post and not only will you be joining some great people who are already doing this, but you get automatically entered into our monthly competition!
So get writing!
Terry Didcott
Author and Co-Founder of Blogging Web 2.0
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Make Money with Free Blogging
Posted on October 20, 2007
Filed Under Blogging | 4 Comments
Free blogging is a huge business with the leading free blogging platforms like Blogger and Wordpress still mightily outnumbering self-hosted blogs. And for good reason - as the vast majority of bloggers are actually not in it to make money or gain recognition as writers or anything else for that matter.
But for those in the internet marketing business, in order to have any sort of shot at true success, the emphasis has generally been on creating your own self-hosted blogs. This is for many good solid reasons, such as control over content and advertising, as well as having access to huge amounts of disk storage and bandwidth as well as guaranteed uptime for often 99.9% of the time.
But free blogs still have their place in the promotional side of internet marketing as well as being excellent foils for making additional income through PPC and affiliate advertising.
Using free blogs intelligently can boost income for many marketers. Their strength is in the fact that they are free and reside on a different IP address as your own hosted blogs, which means links from them will not carry the search engine penalty that interlinking blogs on your own host can bring.
What’s this? Penalty?
After doing some research, it seems that Google at least will actually see interlinked blogs that all live on the same IP address as blog farming which they frown upon. All the more reason to get out into the blogosphere and make lots of new contacts and comment in lots of other blogs.
Generating links from lots of different sources is the only safe way to boost your future page rank.
There is a way around this though. By creating blogs on different platforms, you can interlink more blogs together in a circular fashion. Here is a simple example: blog1 links to blog2, blog2 links to blog3 then blog3 links to blog1. Each blog has it’s own one-way link from a different blog. With multiple blogs, this circular linking can get more complicate, but you’ll have to go figure that one out for yourself.
I tried it with my menagerie of Squidoo lenses and it took ages to figure all the different one-way configurations so that each lens got the maximum number of links!
Incidentally, on that note, Squidoo lenses should also be used in your free blogging empire as they also count when it comes to creating your own inter-link system without triggering the Google red flag.
Surely the best use of free blogs is to use them as adsense (or comparable PPC advertising) revenue generation machines. To do it correctly, you’ll need to spread your blogs over several different niches. Then you’ll need to make the best possible use of your niche keywords by using them in all titles, headers, descriptions and posts and in liberal amounts, but not overdoing it.
Then you have to do what all blogger do and that’s get writing!
After all, it’s no use creating a load of free blogs if you don’t populate them with content relevant to the niches that you’ve worked so hard to create for yourself.
And if you’re not prepared to work like crazy to keep them all up to date as well as promoting them through the several free channels already outlines in previous articles at this site, then don’t expect to see much of a return on all that research.
Nobody said that free meant easy!
Terry Didcott
Author and Creator of Blogging Web 2.0
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Advertising Offline
Posted on October 12, 2007
Filed Under Advertising | Leave a Comment
Since we are on the Internet pretty much every day it sometimes blurs the lines of what is real and what not. Therefore we tend to oversee the obvious when looking for advertising solutions for our products and business. We strive to find the best deal online and score the net for ideas on where to advertise most cost effectively.
But do we ever think about offline means of promoting our business? Advertising in the offline world can be a very effective way to drive traffic to our websites for example. And there are literally dozen if ways we can do this. When I was actively involved in MLM I did a lot of advertising both offline and online and therefore I am very familiar with many advertising avenues. Those I found most effective were not always paid advertising versions either. To promote our business we most often want to send traffic to a website or blog.
So we advertise.
Looking back I tried many things and some worked better than others. But since we are all different you might find that what wouldn’t work well for me would be great for you instead. Another thing with advertising is that it can’t be predicted. It is in fact very seasonal and varies depending on the economy too.
Yes, we do have have stats but these figures are often taken from the top earners in any industry.
So lets look at ways we can advertise our business in the offline world.
- Flashcards are small business cards that offer a quote, a discount or some free info along with your details. They are predominately left wherever you go; in restaurants, in waiting rooms, airport, etc.
- Car Decals are magnetic or stick on car banners with your URL along a catchy logo
- Tshirts are often undervalued when it comes to promotion. Stick your URL on it and wear them in the street.
- Markets are great when you sell some sort of product. They are a great way to get to know your customer and I have personally had a lot of success with markets.
- Local Business chambers; from breakfast meetings to a full business workshop weekend with like minded people within the community can be used to network and promote. In most cities business networking groups are now a common thing and if there isn’t one in your area, why not start one yourself.
- Newspapers are also a cost effective way to advertise. The secret here is to find one that has good rates which becomes increasingly harder and lots of exposure. It takes a lot of research to find some good ones, but they do still exist.
- Newsletters can be a fantastic way to tell the world what you are up to. If you are in the Internet business, why not construct an e - news - gazette where you feature the latest news from the Internet and compile it into a short booklet to disperse at local businesses. Offer them free advertising within or some discount from your service.
- Promotional keyrings, mugs, beach balls etc. offer us with the opportunity to buy in mass for a good rate and get these items branded with our logo, URL or whatever leads them back to us. Give them away for free.
- Local business directories.
- Your Voice is still the best offline tool to advertise your business. You don’t have to be salesy at all to let people know what you do. Just sharing your genuine passion for your business will help to arouse enough interest for others to have a look at what you do.
The methods described above do have some costs assimilated with it. In the end, these methods are simply there to help stimulate your thinking on alternative ways to advertise your business. If you have some ideas to share with our readers, then please let us know and comment below this post.
Take care for now
Monika Mundell Creator and Author of Blogging Web 2.0
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Using Your Blog to Advertise
Posted on October 11, 2007
Filed Under Advertising | 3 Comments
Blogging, while fun and interesting can also make money for the real enthusiast. There are several different methods of using your blog to generate an income, each with differing levels of potential success and earning ability.
However, there is one method that produces predictable results time after time.
This method involves probably the most work from the blogger to achieve, and the income is relatively small, at least in the early days of a blog’s existence. What is this method?
Writing paid reviews.
I’ve covered this topic in a number of posts in a number of different blogs, but it still interests me enough to keep on writing about it as there are always new things to write about and different techniques to be learned.
One such aspect of writing paid reviews is the actual site you decide to write for, as there are several and they all have slightly different ways or working as well as varying degrees of entry criteria for blogs. I’ll cover two such sites as they have consistently worked for me personally. Although there are more that I write for, the others offer review opportunities much less frequently than these two:
PatPerPost and ReviewMe.
Notice there are no links to either site, as I’m not specifically plugging them for any gain here. I do enough of that on my own blogs!
ReviewMe is simple (and free) to join as a publisher (a review writing blogger, if you like). As long as your blog is over three months old and has been posted to regularly with no gaps of more than seven days between posts, they will most likely accept your blog. Of course, if your blog has a low or zero page rank as well as a very low Alexa rank, these will count against you. Although they may still accept your blog, the amount of opportunities offered to you to review will be severely limited.
This is why you should spend your first three months building your blog’s content and promoting it to obtain a reasonable readership, so that at least your traffic rank from Alexa will be reasonable. Google is another kettle of fish to fry!
Average payments for new blogs from ReviewMe is $5 for a minimum 200 word post. You will also be expected to include links to the advertiser in your post.
PayPerPost has similar entry criteria to ReviewMe. Again, you will be offered more opportunities the better rated your blog is. The average value of most opportunities for new bloggers is $5 per post, although the word count varies from as little as 50 up to 300 depending on the advertiser’s criteria and the amount of links also varies from advertiser to advertiser.
The difference is that with PayPerPost, they list a good selection of opportunities and you can see which ones are available to you and which are not and they tell you why. This is my favourite site to write reviews for - I’ve made more money with them than with all the others combined so far. As well as the usual offered opportunities, they have “special offer days” where they will throw in some high paying review opportunities and make them available to the lower rated bloggers too - sometimes an opportunity can have a value of as much as $150!
Available opportunities at PayPerPost change constantly and can sometimes be snapped up quickly by other on the ball bloggers, so you have to be diligent!So it is worth signing up with these two sites at least and you should be able to add maybe $20 or so per week to your blog’s income if you work hard at it and keep your eye on the list of opportunities.
Here’s to your success!
Terry Didcott
Author and Creator of Blogging Web 2.0
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Statistical Static
Posted on October 10, 2007
Filed Under Promotion | Leave a Comment
Did you know that statistically, some 95% of all Internet Marketers fail?
That’s a pretty alarming statistic if you’re just about to start out in this dog-eat-dog, cut-throat business. It might even put you off even bothering. But don’t despair!
Of that 95% of Internet Marketers, the vast majority of them came into the business with the sole intention of creating a website, filling it with ads, pressing a button and then sitting back in their chair with their arms folded behind their heads to wait for the money to fall out of the sky.
That’s because they were sucked into this seemingly bottomless vacuum with the promise that they would make a fortune by doing five minutes work and everything else would happen on auto-pilot.
So how did these people get so easily duped?
Easy. Its called “hype” and thousands, if not millions of people fall for it every day. Not just online, either. This applies to all types of media advertising, the most powerful of which is television. I won’t go into the technical reasons why this is so right here. Trying to explain all the intricate details would most likely fill a good sized book (something for the To Do list, I think…), but suffice it to say that television advertising is incredibly powerful and alluring.
Why?
In it’s simplest terms, television not only reaches into everybody’s homes and intrudes on their everyday lives, by it’s very placement in a dominating spot in your main living space and its bright, rapidly flickering, constantly in motion and colourful display, our eyes are naturally and almost forcibly drawn toward it even when we try to ignore it.
If you don’t believe me, try having a conversation with someone where you’re both sitting at right angles to the TV (while it’s switched on, of course!) and see how many times your attention is diverted away from the person you’re talking with towards the TV! Even if it’s for a couple of seconds or even a quick glance here and there, you will do it - we all do!
That’s what makes TV advertising so endearing and alluring. People can’t tear their eyes away from the thing. And advertisers know this. They use it to to its fullest extent to sell their wares - more successfully than by any other medium, ever.
That was until the explosion in ownership of an internet connection. This still fairly new medium is rapidly catching up television as the next big player for the advertising industry. The same lure applies to the internet as it does to television. Surfers are glues to their screens, so anything the advertisers put up, they see. These advertising images and messages are registered in the surfers’ memories and will have a greater of lesser influence on their decision making process, depending on how good the ad is. The more excitement and desire the ad generates and the more “hot buttons” the ad pushes, the more likely the viewer will click the ad out of sheer curiosity.
And what’s more exciting and desirable than being told you’ll make a truckload of money if you follow this link?
Not much - and that’s how the hypesters hook in so many gullible hopefuls to part with their cash in order to jump onto the “Great Make Money Quick” bandwagon.
For 95% of those poor hopefuls, failure is the harsh lesson learned.
Of the other 5% that do not fail, a small percentage manage to achieve financial self-sufficiency from the internet, while a considerably smaller percentage actually get rich from it.
Why do those who do make money online, achieve this?
- They didn’t fall for the hype
- They realised that money does not fall from the sky
- They also realised that that there is no such thing as quick, easy money
- They knew they had to knuckle down and work hard
Follow this four point reasoning of the successful people online and you stand a good chance of being able to make money too. Don’t expect it to happen fast, because unless you’re already at the top of the tree, it won’t.
Here’s to your success!
Terry Didcott
Author and Creator of Blogging Web 2.0
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Advertising With Your Blog
Posted on October 3, 2007
Filed Under Advertising | Leave a Comment
Blogging has many benefits, from the sense of achievement you get from creating and publishing your own written mini-masterpieces and showing them off to the world, to the financial reward potential a well run and marketed blog can achieve.
So let’s look at that financial incentive that spurs many bloggers on to push for ever higher readership figures and exposure and the primary source of that monetary gain.
In a word, advertising.
The power of advertising cannot be overstated. It is a multi-billion dollar industry in its own right that can make or break small, medium or large businesses alike.
So how does that translate into the humble (and not so humble) blog?
Blogs of all shapes and sizes, themes and topics, styles and interests abound in cyberspace in their millions. While most are simple online diaries kept for family and friend and others are less simple but a platform for creative output there is a third, large type of blog that this post will be of interest to.
That’s the make money blogs that have been created, populated with content and promoted with the express purpose of making money for its owner. With this in mind, these blogs are highly informative and interesting points of reference for readers with an interest in their niche and they are promoted and marketed with a view to appropriating the best readership they can possibly muster.
With these ingredients in place, these blogs are ready to accept bids for their sidebar or banner space from advertisers who are willing to pay according to the potential exposure a certain blog can prove that it’s capable of producing.
That’s why, when you’re blog is still relatively new and still growing, that you work hard at promoting and marketing it as much as possible in order to prepare it for the day when you open your doors to the advertising world, secure in the knowledge that you have achieved a large enough reader base to ensure those advertisers will be clambering over each other in order to secure some of your valuable advertising space.
So look forward to success and prosperity by laying the foundations right now with a combination of hard work and intelligent promotion and marketing - and you’ll be amazed at what is possible!
Terry Didcott
Author and Creator of Blogging Web 2.0
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